Weaver, Boyd family interview

ORAL HISTORY OF BOYD WEAVER
Interviewed by Cynthia (Weaver) Russell
With George Russell
ca. 1992
[Tape 2] [Editor’s note: We have begun the transcript with Tape 2 because the audio cassette labels conflict with the natural order of subjects in the interview. The recording appears to begin while the interview is in progress.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: About sixty of the elements in nature, not including those that are made artificially by fission in reactors, have stable isotopes, or isotopes with very long half-lives. They’re not all completely stable. For example, the potassium, which we have in our body, over time has one one-hundredth of a percent of potassium-40, which has a half-life of a billion years. There’s not a lot of activity there. We’ve counted beta or gamma activity of potassium, and that potassium decay is one of chief sources of all the [inaudible], because it has inside – the elements uranium and thorium produce a lot of [inaudible] too. They have half lives much longer than a billion years. Now, to get back to the so-called stable elements, the even numbered elements in the periodic table have more isotopes than the odd numbered elements.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Was that known when the table was set up?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, they didn’t know about isotopes when the table was first set up. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Aston and Lindemann made an isotope separator and found there were two isotopes at least on neon. They split them off in different directions, and they discovered that they were isotopes, and then they began looking for isotopes of other elements. Well, they [went] through the periodic table, and for example, hydrogen has two isotopes, one or two. There may be an exception to that. Helium has a mass of four, and we don’t say it has an isotope, but it has a nuclide which has a mass of four. The next element is lithium, which has two isotopes. Its number seven mass is much more above a six mass, ninety-seven-and-a-half percent and two-and-a-half percent.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Now, what are you talking about?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: For hydrogen, this means hydrogen-1 and deuterium.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Okay, you’re talking about extra protons?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, both hydrogens have one proton, and hydrogen-2 has a neutron with it. Hydrogen-1 has no neutron. In the case of lithium, there are three protons and three or four neutrons. Beryllium is all one mass. Though in our isotope separation program, we once did separate 9 from 10. 10 was radioactive; it had been produced in the reactor. There was material in the reactor that contained beryllium, and after being there a long while radiated with neutrons, somebody started trying to find out something about beryllium-10, so we separated the isotopes of beryllium-9 and 10, got very little of 10, of course, and then it was not anywhere near pure. There was enough 10 that its radioactivity – I don’t know what its half-life is, but it’s enough to keep quite a while. It’s very low, it’s a very long half-life, it wasn’t very radioactive. I found a friend at the lab who was doing a lot of work on counting, and we went over to his place and put it in the counter, and determined the energy of beryllium-10. This was published about 1949.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What did the beryllium look like?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, beryllium is a metal that looks like aluminum. It has an oxide which is white powder. It is deposited in these pockets as a metal, like every other metal that’s in the calutron. But that metal had – there were other things with it, so that had to be put in solution and then purified chemically and converted to the oxide. [inaudible] The next element is boron, and it has one mass, and then there’s carbon. One percent of all the carbon in the world is carbon-13; the rest is carbon-12. There are other ways to separate carbon; you can put carbon dioxide through a thermal diffusion device. Since there’s so much carbon around everywhere, we didn’t trying separating that with the magnetic process, but we could have. The next one is nitrogen; it’s a gas and does not fit in with hydrogen or – well, we talked about separating it, but it can be separated by thermal diffusion also.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What is thermal diffusion?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: In thermal diffusion you have – the usual thing is a tube which has a very – well, it’s a complex of tubes, one inside another. The first plant that I worked at in Oak Ridge for a week, I told you about that, for a week was thermal diffusion. It had a pipe in the center that was fifteen hundred pound steam, so it was very, very hot. Then there was a hundredth of an inch between that and the next pipe, which had cold water running through it. You can do this thing for the family of gases, and when the gas moves slowly through it, the gas at the outer side may have a little higher content of one of the isotopes than the other one. The heavier one goes to the outside. [inaudible] They are set up in a cascade. There are isotope separation devices outside of it like a magnetic process. The series of stages are called a cascade. As I told you, a stream is several – you don’t call a straight fall a cascade. A cascade is a stream of water that makes several jumps to get to the bottom. [inaudible] Well then the next one is oxygen. [inaudible]
Mr. George Russell: Excuse me, but I’m having a hard time understanding what you’re doing right now. I don’t know why we’re talking about the periodic table.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, because my work had to do with separating the isotopes of the elements in the periodic table, but then I will get into the, later, into the –
Mr. George Russell: Early years of Oak Ridge?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. I’m going into the periodic table and the effect that it has on the difficulty of getting the elements when I get down to a certain group.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Was your assignment just to separate the isotopes of all the elements of the table?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The Electromagnetic Separation Department was [inaudible]. They no longer were using the electromagnetic process for separating uranium isotopes, but they took the experimental, a small plant, there were two at least, and one was larger than the other, could have been used as a pilot plant to test things before equipment would be used in the big plant with a hundred-and-ninety-two units in a horseshoe, well, ninety-six in a horseshoe. There were two horseshoes in the building. [inaudible] So this is what those people did. Now, I didn’t do that work. I had the [inaudible]. We prepared the material that went into the calutrons and took pockets that, mega – material, separated isotopes in and whatever chemistry was necessary to get every other element without contaminating each other or with anything else that was the same element. For example, iron, there’s [inaudible] so you had to be very careful you didn’t get any in. Same thing is true for the other elements. Well, the only element so far that I��ve mentioned that has isotopes is lithium, and we did that. Then we get down, well, in the Periodic Table, you have, well, you have two elements in the first series and eight in the next going across this way, and eight in the third, and then after that there were eighteen in each, each group. When you go across that way, the difference in these elements is what you might call a qualitative difference. They’re definitely different elements that have different properties. They may be metals, on the left side of the table, or the elements on the other side which will combine [inaudible] with hydrogen or with metals, basically. [inaudible] is certainly different from magnesium, for example. It’s a metal. When you go down the other way, the differences are what you’d call quantitative. There’s not so very much difference between lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium. Chemically, they’re all alkali metals. You put these metals in water and you get, well, with sodium, you’d get what we call lye. And the others would do the same thing. It happens that, and you might usually think that if you get higher and higher, atomic weights would have higher melting points. In this case, it’s the reverse direction. Lithium is considered to have a much higher melting point than sodium. Potassium is still lower, and they become more active as you go down. You put sodium in water and you hold it still, it will produce hydrogen, and it’s a fact that it may catch fire. You put a little potassium in water, it catches fire. The hydrogen [inaudible]. And cesium’s even more so. And then in the case of the next group, there are the alkaline earths, beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium, and radium, and they are somewhat less active in their bases, but calcium – but you can make sodium hydroxide by putting calcium hydroxide in a sodium chloride solution, except of course for the difference in solubilities that they have [inaudible]. And that is true all the way across the table until, now I’m moving a long ways. Well, let’s see, I might go back. But we separated, there’s some other things that I did that were covered. We separated potassium isotopes. There were two isotopes, 49 and 40, and as I said 40 was only 1/100th percent. But I was interested in – 40 was radioactive, and I was interested in [inaudible]. He was interested in doing this. Well, it was the same person who tried beryllium later. [inaudible] P. R. Bell. Was it a Bell boy? No, I’m not sure, but [inaudible].
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Why were they interested the [inaudible] metals? Why did that [inaudible]?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, these are just things that you get free from doing the work over there. I had the storage of all these isotopes too when they got them purified, and this is [inaudible] you pick up; these are the things that couldn’t be done. When there’s only 1/100th of a percent, you really can’t get enough activity compared to – with all the background activity you have – to get a good figure for the energy; it was too slow. But when we enhanced it some, I guess it was still only less than 2/10th of a percent that we got out of that pocket. I think the other – later, they did much better than that, but I got to working on it and so we did [inaudible].
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: And the beta energy is what?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, you have alpha, beta, and gamma rays, and for a specific isotope, radioisotope, you have a certain [inaudible]. The alpha energy is very definite to a hundredth of a, well, most of these were up in the millions of volts of energy very definite to two thousand volts [inaudible]. In the case of beta, they had a distribution of –it goes like this and comes to a maximum energy at the top of this curve, where most of them are, and you’ve got the time of the [inaudible]. We had to compare this to something else, too, that was going on, in order to get it. But they didn’t know as much about measuring, so they had to take this [inaudible]. But anyway, they determined that the energy of this was about 1.4 million volts, electron volts. And P. R. Bell also was in it, you know. What’s the energy? What’s the gamma energy? Maybe somebody could do that. I prepared the material for them, about a kilogram of potassium carbonate, natural potassium carbonate. You put it in a can, fitted it to this detecting device. He would make [inaudible]. It would pick up the radiation, [inaudible] radiation and convert it to light, which then could be picked up by a photo [inaudible] and with devices added to that, you could tell what the energy – the strength of those light pulses was proportional to the energy of the radiation. Now they’ve improved this to a very high science, but at that time things were still crude, but he was making materials that would do this. Well, most of these things, we could get – we could buy most of the elements. We could buy [inaudible], until they got down to one group of elements and they said you have qualitative differences across, and you have quantitative differences going down, difference in magnitude, until we get down to element 57. Now, these differences depend on the arrangement of the electrons in the shells, so [inaudible]. The boundary for a shell is the probability that an electron will be in a certain place at a certain time. You can call them shells. The chemical properties of an element depend on the number of electrons out in those shells. As that increases up to eight, why, properties change. You get down to element 57, lanthanum, and then start adding electrons to it, the effective electrons that determine its chemistry are not in the outer shell, but farther down in. So therefore, the addition of one electron does not make very much difference in the chemistry. And if you keep adding them, that difference between them becomes less and less, so that the differences between these elements, 57 to 70, the [inaudible], are no longer qualitative differences that make them separate but quantitative differences, slight differences, very slight, and they become closer and closer together as you get up through the series. Now, there are some exceptions. Cerium can be oxidized so that [inaudible]. It���s like titanium or zirconium. Titanium, zirconium, and hafnium are somewhat similar, going down the table. [inaudible] when it’s oxidized. Otherwise, it’s trivalent and behaves like a trivalent element. Aluminum is in that same group, but there’s quite a bit of difference between aluminum and the first element is lanthanum, and then there’s cerium and praseodymium, neodymium, and then there was an element missing from nature, promethium, which was made – about six percent of the elements at are produced by fission of uranium in the reactor is promethium. This element was discovered and named at Oak Ridge, which people don’t know, you know. They called it promethium because, well, Prometheus was the Greek god who got fire to their area. We had fission, brings us a new fire. And here’s an element that was not in nature but was now produced in the series. And one of the – well, there were two elements that were missing by that time. Well, going on up there’s samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium.
Mr. George Russell: Are those all in the Periodic Table?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh yeah, those are all natural elements. They become increasingly rare if you go up through the series.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Except that – but in addition to that, any odd element is much rarer than the even element immediately following it. So you really have two series, the even elements and the odd elements through the series. Most of these have isotopes. Four or five of them have seven each. And there’s one of them, neodymium has an even numbered isotope which should be there because every even number for a series, at least four even numbers, the isotope – there’s a vacant space for an even element, an even isotope. Well, with all these elements, praseodymium, terbium, thulium do not have any isotopes. [inaudible] And the others all do have. The odd elements have only two. There aren’t – well, masses also. No, lanthanum has an even number for the mass. europium has151 and 153, and lutetium is 168 and 170, I believe. No, higher, 175 and 176.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Which ones of those elements did you work with, the isotopes?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, I was responsible for getting the raw materials for these.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: For all of them?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Wow.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, so I started inquiring about where, buying rare earths. I knew that the situation was very discouraging. We could buy all the cerium we wanted. It came out of Lindsay Chemical Plant in West Chicago.
Mr. George Russell: West Chicago?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Your new neighbor, another plant next to where you live in West Chicago.
Mr. George Russell: On Bingham?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Plant on –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Right up on the hill. They cut off the [inaudible] Sound.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I didn’t know there was a hill. Well, in those days, there was only the old plant. They built a big one later.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Right back of the school.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, on – what’s the name of the street?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Hah! I knew it.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, it was – by the time you lived there, it was American Potash. It was only two blocks from your house or less. [inaudible]
Mr. George Russell: Which house, the [inaudible] house?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The townhouse.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: If you went across the pinnacle, kept on going through, you’d come right out [inaudible].
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and I guess we bought our lanthanum from there too. As I said, cerium can be oxidized, so it wasn’t hard to get it pure, separated from lanthanum. And there’s quite a lot of difference, then, between lanthanum and – well, lanthanum and cerium could be bought in kilogram quantities. We decided that we really needed a kilogram of the oxide [inaudible] you usually get of each of the elements that have isotopes in order to prepare enough, produce enough in putting it through the calutrons to do anything with it. You can buy that much cerium or more and that much lanthanum. We separated those, and we also got neodymium. It probably cost several hundred dollars per kilogram. [inaudible] much cheaper. In January 1948 I went to a [inaudible] conference –
[Tape 1, Side B]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: There’s features on physics and rare earth elements, one on magnetism and the other one on – oh, I’ve forgotten what was accepted. He was a very good speaker, but I heard him give the same speech then sixteen years later too. But I heard someone say as we were leaving the lecture hall, what was donated was a way to separate rare earth. It was true. And I did learn something about – oh, I talked with a friend of mine, of course a person whom I’d just met there who was from Los Angeles who had a small rare earth company, and I inquired him about getting a kilogram of one of these heavier rare earths. He says, “Well, we have about a kilogram of a mixture which I would sell you for three thousand dollars, but this is a mixture of all the elements above neodymium. It would be mostly samarium and then less gadolinium and so on up. They weren’t separated; it was a mixture. In May, I took a trip, inquiring about the possibility of getting rare earths. The first place I went to was Chicago. I’d met the head of the research lab at the Replicator meeting, Howard Kramers, and he showed me around his lab. He didn’t give much promise of ever being able to produce anything. By that time both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Iowa State, Ames Laboratory, had found a way of separating rare earths, which greatly improved the method. Before that it had been done by crystallization, fractional crystallization. You take a salt, you take a mixture of a rare earth salt with another salt, which would produce a double salt that would crystallize out, the crystallized part of it. The example [is] magnesium rare earth nitrate. The lighter elements will give you a double salt which is less soluble than that of the heavier elements. So therefore you get partial separation in making one precipitation. You can take those two fractions and break them up into two and those into two more and you get eight, and then you can work them back and forth across there, taking parts that are most alike. And people have gone to hundreds or even more than a thousand fractionations to try to get some of the heavier elements and they still had only milligrams, and they weren’t that pure. And that was the state of separation for the heavier rare earths at that time. They did a lot of fractional crystallization at West Chicago Plant. The whole plant was based on that except for the cerium separation. That was the old plant. But people at Oak Ridge and at Ames – well, at Oak Ridge, a method was discovered, ion exchange. You have beads of a resin, which when treated with sulfuric acid, the sulfate ion sticks out here and will attract metals, hold them on the surface, and the rare earths are among those elements which, going down through the series, and this is what they applied it to first really, go down through the series, lanthanum will come out first and then go right up through the series, that more and more difficult to come out, so that way you get separation. Now, the way they did it at Oak Ridge, there’s still overlap. The concentration you get out of each one of them, you have a probability curve coming out. There’s a little bit here, and then up through, and then a tail behind it. And the beginning of the next one overlaps that, and so on down through the series. And that’s the way they separated promethium from other stuff, by putting it on one of these columns here. Well at Ames they later found that by raising the pH and doing some other things like that, they could stack these elements on top of another with a very clear division between them.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: In the glass columns, the glass columns that you could see.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. Of course if you had only a very little bit of an element, it wouldn’t come out very pure because there’d be some overlapping out on the edge. But they were beginning to develop this, and were producing considerable quantities of the lightest elements. They hadn’t gone very far yet, but they were doing this. Well, Howard Kramers told me that he would never use ion exchange because the pure water that you had to have cost too much, so they would stick with what they were doing. I went on up to Ames and talked with the director of the Ames laboratory, and of course he showed me around, and I saw that they were doing an ion exchange. As I say, they hadn’t gone very far. Well I did, though, while I was at West Chicago, ordered a kilogram of samarium oxide, which they produced, had never done this before, had produced that kilogram of samarium oxide, charged me six hundred dollars. Howard later told me they lost money on it. It was supposed to be about ninety-eight percent pure. At Ames, the director showed me a hundred grams that he had of europium oxide. It’s the rarest of the rare earths, unless lutetium is the rarer. But it can be reduced to a valence of two and three, so it should be separated if you reduce it. If you contact it at a very low acidity, say in citric acid or acetic acid with mercury, the mercury will take up the europium, and it will also take the samarium with it and ytterbium. You can keep the europium at the solution, but you can’t keep the other two, so that way you can get those separated too. Which limited us to a kilogram which had been given to him by a professor at University of Illinois where Howard Kramers had done his undergraduate and graduate work and got his Ph.D. on rare earths, and he was very proud of that. Well, eventually I also ordered from Howard Kramers a mixture of rare earths which had twenty-five percent samarium and a lesser percent gadolinium and a little bit of the others, and we went to work on that. We tried fractional crystallization; we couldn’t get the right kind of crystals to come down. Magnesium nitrate. I called Howard and told him so; he sent me a little envelope with some crystals in it, which I used as seed crystals, and then we could get lanthanide crystals. His lab had these in the air and everywhere, but until you had a seed crystal, you’d never get that kind of crystal. [laughter]
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Really?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: That’s right. You remember Fred Kaplan; you babysat for his children, didn’t you?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Yeah.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, well, he and I did most of the work on other things, and we did have some other people who came and went on the work that he was on, were stuck with moving on with strong rare earths. We got crystals out of it, but it still was extremely slow. We didn’t get very far. Soon after that, I heard that there was another way to separate rare earths, and then at Argonne Laboratory, which was then at the University of Chicago campus, had a way to separate them by solvent extraction. You take an organic compound, which at that time he diluted with a petroleum product, and contact that with a phosphate compound, tributyl phosphate [TBP]. Butyl is C4H9, and have that attached to phosphate, PO4. It’s a liquid, lighter or about the same density as water. The rare earths are extracted by this from very strong hydrochloric or nitric acid. You have to have really concentrated hydrochloric or very high concentration of nitric acid. You have your rare earths in that; the TBP will take a higher fraction of the heavier elements, a greater distribution of the heavier rare earths than it does the lighter ones. So you can work out a fractional method this way.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What kind of stuff would you have to wear when you were working on that?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, you wear gloves.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Made out of what?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Rubber. Well, you’d just be careful, and you get, you’d have nitric acid burns on your fingers.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What about breathing the fumes?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The final plant that we put up with – what we call – with eighty-five mixer settlers, each of which had a one hundred horsepower motor on it, with liquids flowing from one to the other in both directions and going down through the middle, we could smell nitric acid all the time, because there were leaks in the covers on these things. We had to have stirrers going down through holes, and gases could come up, so it wasn’t a very pleasant place to work, but we worked at this for years.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Now I saw that, I think, didn’t I? Or something like that. Anyway, I saw columns at the lab.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, that was at X-10. You never got into the Y-12.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: All right. Could have been. Was that – is the same thing I saw is what you’re talking about?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well it could be done with columns, or were those ion exchange columns? No, at X-10, I didn’t have any ion exchange columns. I don’t remember.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I remember the door through the left. You could take – where you worked with rubber gloves and a window.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Glass chamber?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and a hood with –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: In the center of the room, there were columns. On the right wall, there was more stuff. It’s been so long that I can’t remember, but it seems like there were long columns there.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well we had these on the wall next to the room where the isotope separators were finally. Oh, well you did get into Y-12.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I did.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Okay, and liquids ran back and forth.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: It was incredible. I remember I was very impressed.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Of course all you can do with that is on the basis of what you know about their distribution coefficients, which acidity and relative flow rates of the liquids so that you split between two elements. You have everything below that going one way, and everything together on going through once, except that we did put a total reflex on both ends of it on a batch so this one that we were talking about first was continuous. You feed in in the middle, and it goes both ways and they come out, but all you can do is split between the two. You can separate all elements separately. So then you have to take this end fraction and go and work on it again. But what we did with double reflex on it was to just put a batch of quite a lot of material and work that back and forth a while so they were distributed across the rare earths. In fact the stuff in the reflexer on one end was thirty percent lutetium, even though it’s an extremely rare element. We’d put a lot of material in. Well, we had previously concentrated this. Well, anyway, first, we had rather crude equipment. We did have an extraction column. Well, at Y-12 before that, we had extraction columns as well as – well, that’s right. If you saw columns and these mixer settlers on the wall, that had to be in building 9731 at Y-12. And the calutrons were just – there wasn’t even a wall between them. There was an opening between that and the calutrons. So you did get in there. Yeah, well, that’s what it was. And we did use columns too for some of the work. I did use some columns out in another building. But anyway, that’s what that was for.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Let me ask you something else. When you got the things that came from the lab in Chicago, how did they ship them? What kind of containers?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, this was just oxides that were shipped in cardboard containers. Yeah, nothing but oxides in them. Before we went to 9731, I was up at 9207, 9211. Used to go quite a ways until I got moved out of there. Biology took over in the 1950s, we moved into 9211, and then this was down closer to the rest of the operations, so in ’53 and ’54 we went down to 9731, and that’s where the columns were put up.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: How did you do that?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, we didn’t have all those columns. Those were all made by the glass blowers, and they set them up. Kurt Kappelman and Lamar Royer did the work of setting up all those mixer settlers. That’s quite a change from Lamar Royer’s teaching physics at Oak Ridge High School. [laughter] But as a result of that, Lamar Royer spent four years in West Chicago too. [laughter] Later. But anyway, while we were still at 9211, then a crude way and just taking things in flasks and putting them back and forth, [Krebb?] and one or two other people working with him, mostly [Krebb’s?] work, produced a kilogram of ninety-five percent gadolinium oxide, which nobody had ever done before, not that much, at least I thought so. I went to an American Chemical Society meeting in Atlantic City and gave a paper on this, and then Howard Kramers told me that he and Ron, who was there with him, had produced a kilogram from fractional crystallization. But they did that only because I’d gotten them interested in doing it. And then later we made several kilograms of gadolinium. When we got to disclosing, it was much more difficult. But by combining that with our solvent extraction, we did get considerable amounts of some of these elements. But about this time, people became more – well, the Ames people made larger and larger quantities. The people in California put up columns. I also talked them into – I got a trip to California ’cause I talked them into using solvent extraction. I went out the day they were ready to set it up. But I did an awfully dumb thing. You had to have pumps to pump the electrodes and the equipment was glass, glass columns with glass pipes, tubes going up from it, this small tube, and they connected that small tube to the pump with a solid connection instead of having a flexible rubber tube. As soon as they started up, the vibrations broke it, so I didn’t ever get to see them do anything. In fact they dropped the solvent extraction after all their trouble with doing it. I was their consultant for a while. But eventually, guess who had the largest ion exchange columns in the world. Howard Kramers. He said he would never use ion exchange because getting pure water would be too expensive. And in that old building, we had forty-eight inch columns. You know that night that I was there when you were supervising a high school party in the high school at midnight? What was his name, the other couple? His wife was a good friend of yours. He didn’t go to church. At midnight, he took me over to the old plant. He said if he had to go through channels, it would have taken a year, and probably then refused to get me into the plant, but he took me over there.
Mr. George Russell: Did he work there?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes, he worked in the plant. Yes, at midnight. They’d never even admitted to anyone that they used solvent extraction.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I didn’t realize that that was such a hush-hush thing.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: First thing that I saw was these columns, forty-eight inches in diameter and twenty feet high made out of ceramics that they were using to separate rare earth. You know, he said they’d never do it. Before I saw those, though, I’ve seen columns two feet in diameter at St. Louis, Michigan, the Michigan chemical company [Michigan Chemical Corporation]. I was their consultant for a while too, and I talked them into using solvent extraction and they used a different extraction from what I had used and had a big project on the thing. The reason that they were doing this, the reason they had all this was because for a while there were plans to have a nuclear powered aircraft, and the reactor was to have –
Mr. George Russell: An aircraft carrier?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Airplane, aircraft, yeah, not a carrier, but aircrafts, an aircraft, oh yeah. The trouble was that it had to be so long to be safe for the personnel, and it would have to have so much shielding that it could never go more than three hundred miles an hour, and probably not that, so after spending millions and millions of dollars on this, they gave it up. But the reactor, experimental reactor was in Oak Ridge. They were going to use yttrium. Now, I didn’t mention the fact that yttrium, which is element 39, lanthanum is 57, it’s 39, it’s in the same family column and has chemistry like the heavier rare earths, like erbium. It would be very difficult to separate from erbium and thulium. But yttrium does not absorb neutrons to speak of, so they were going to use yttrium hydride in a part of the reactor, and they had to have very, very pure yttrium. One part per million of gadolinium would spoil it. There were various plans made to get pure yttrium. The people at West Chicago were doing the best they could with ion exchange, and then they shifted to St. Louis, Michigan and – no, they had ion exchange too, but I think part of it came from West Chicago before that. So I saw their columns once. And we were up in Akron for a vacation, why, went on up to West Chicago and St. Louis, Michigan, and I’d been there before and that’s what got me interested in solvent extraction.
Mr. George Russell: Where did you meet this Howard Kramers?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, he must have been at the rare earth conference in Phoenix in ’64.
Mr. George Russell: Where did you meet him in West Chicago?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, at the high school party. We were chaperones at a party, and he and his wife were also chaperones, so you should be able to remember who they were. You two couples were the only chaperones.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I can’t even remember – was it a church group we chaperoned for?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes. I think they were more involved in it than that. And remember when I went over to Chicago to pick Melissa up and got back late because I got on the wrong road, headed for Minneapolis?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Oh, no!
Mr. Boyd Weaver: And got out past the airport. Coming back I asked the man at the toll booth how to get to West Chicago; he said, “You’re in it now.” He didn’t know there was a city of West Chicago. But anyway, at midnight that night, he took me in, first showed me these columns and then he showed me their solvent extraction system. Well, they were not using tributyl phosphate, they were using di-2-ethylhexal phosphoric acid, which uses very dilute hydrochloric acid, and would separate rare earths that way. And what they were doing, even with the big ion exchange columns, they were interested then in making gadolinium more than anything else because there was a special use for gadolinium for shielding. It was for TVs. Originally, the greatest improvement ever made in the early days in TV color was to use europium oxide on the screen. That made europium very much needed, quite a demand for it, and as I said, Spudding showed me one hundred grams. Only, in our program, solvent extraction, we produced six hundred grams of pure europium oxide, because it could be reduced to a valence of two and joined with mercury and then washed out, separated from the rare earths. A little bit of gadolinium went along with it and samarium, but it could be taken out first. But we, back then, Professor Hopkins at University of Illinois by Long Lake –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: But what did you do with it?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, we separated the isotopes of europium with the material that we made. We also used that ninety-five percent gadolinium to separate the isotopes. Now when it came to other elements, after many years, the people at West Chicago were making, eventually, they made most of the elements, most of the earths. They made 99.9999% of individual rare earths and they made them in kilogram quantities. The lutetium we bought from them – I’m not sure whether we got a kilogram or a pound – it may have been only a pound – it was twenty-three hundred dollars. But we couldn’t have got a gram; ten years before that, you couldn’t have got a gram.
Granddaughter: Why did you go to see him at night instead of in the daytime?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Because he couldn’t have gotten permission from his bosses to get me in. They were always afraid that somebody – well, they were afraid of me because they thought I might talk to someone else who was a competitor of theirs.
Mr. George Russell: Was this guy in management then?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, in operations management.
Mr. George Russell: I do remember when you came up once you mentioned that someone you knew lived there.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: He also mentioned that the smell in the air was not good.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I saw nitric oxide cans still in that place.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Where did those come from?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, probably when they ignited the nitrates that they made in the fractional crystallization. I mean this had been going on for fifty years or more, the old methods.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible: I didn’t know that anything was over there.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] He didn’t even know that American Potash was there, right? You mean you didn’t ever walk down far enough to see that plant? I found it right away.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible: That’s because I thought the plant was behind the road.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, you took me down there.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, well there wouldn’t be all the time anyway, but I did go out there once to see a little bit of things, but I never did see the new big plant that you see by Columbia. But that’s where high production is coming from, and it was that plant that was producing so much pollution that they went out of business.
[Tape 1, Side A]
[Editor’s note: The recording begins as the interview is in progress.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: … that I got a bonus out of the samarium isotope separation, too. There’s seven isotopes in samarium. Samarium is radioactive, naturally radioactive, very low alpha activity, but nobody knew which one of the seven isotopes was active. A Dr. Dempster at the University of Chicago spent many, many years with his mass spectroscopes trying to find out – mass spectrograph, trying to find out what he would collect – he would put material through the mass spectrograph, which put it – each of the isotopes in a line like this and then take those materials and would run this for a long while, and of course he’d collect extremely small amounts in the mass spectrograph. He would collect – you don’t get anywhere near a milligram, and he would put these on photographic plates and leave them for a long while, hoping to determine them that way, which isotope was active. He published two or three times, and he changed his mind about which it was, but he wasn’t certain. Well, when we separated the isotopes, it was easy. Here we had all seven isotopes. They weren’t completely pure, but all I had to do was take a definite amount of each of these isotopes – this was a very few milligrams of each – put them in solution and put drops on a stainless steel plate, about so big, and dry them and then put them in an alpha counter and count the alpha activity. I could even – when I got these numbers together, it was very obvious that it was samarium-147. The amount of samarium-147 in each – the activity that I got from each of these seven plates was directly proportional to the percentage of 147 in each of these, except the 148 was a little high, and I should have been a little more careful about it. I thought, well, we usually make that mistake with low anyway, but it was a little higher than it should have been. So I published this in – or I submitted it to Physical Review for publication in the latter part of 1950. My letter got to somebody at the University of Chicago or Argonne before it came out and they sent me a letter asking me to not – well, I had mentioned Dempster’s work, but it made it sound as though I was giving light to his work. He was dead by that time, hadn’t been very long, and I got a request that I rewrite this. He had spent his life’s work on trying to find these out. After he died, they found on his desk a paper which said he was now certain that it was 147, but he’d never published it. Well this made my paper about two weeks late. When it came out, there was also a paper from somebody at the University of California or one of the other California schools also reporting that it was 147, but they had done it a different way. They had actually made, in a cyclotron, had made enough 147, enough of different ones of these, that they found out that 147 was active, was alpha active, so we published at the same time. Years later, I saw in one of the more recent isotope charts that 148 is also active, but very much less so. Its half-life is – well, that of 147 is something like a hundred billion years. This one is even longer. Maybe it’s ten billion and a hundred billion. And that made me think, then, if I’d been a little more careful, I could have said that 148 might also be active and should have because of that little slightly higher number, but I didn’t. [laughter] At the same time, though, that I published it, somebody had also said that 148 might be active, or they disagreed on my finding. I didn’t see how they could. My numbers were certain that 147 was anyway. But this is the thing that I got –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: They were publishing on 148 and you were on 147, huhn?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, so that was just a bonus, to get the isotopes separated. Well, that’s about enough for the so-called lanthanides, because it begins with lanthanum; you’ve got these fifteen elements. But about the time that I changed over, then, to Chemical Technology Division in ’58, I got into working with other elements. I did work on solvent extraction. It was practically all solvent extraction from then on, solvent extraction of neptunium. I did a big project on neptunium and published the paper in a journal called Chemical Engineering Data. I didn’t know where I wanted to publish it, but that’s where the publishers put it. Not very many people read it compared to what read a journal that’s called Inorganic Chemistry. If I had gotten my paper written a year or so sooner, I could have been published in Inorganic Chemistry, because I had a friend who was editor of that paper, and he had encouraged me to do it, but I wanted to get some more information before I published it. The editor at the time that I submitted it, the University of Colorado didn’t know anything about solvent extraction or the transplutonium elements. We call these the transplutonium elements, beyond plutonium. Again, you have a series of elements with very similar chemistry. There’s very little difference as you go up through the series. Well, neptunium is different, but beyond plutonium, they are trivalent for a ways, and the chemistry is very similar. But not only that, they’re very similar to the lanthanides. This is americium, curium, berkelium, californium, and einsteinium. And then when they get to mendelevium, they begin to be slightly different, but still somewhat the same. So my interest, then, later became those elements after I’d published neptunium.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: And those are all radioactive.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: They’re all very radioactive.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Were you using mechanical hands when you were working with these?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Nope, this was all done at tracer level, so that I could do it in little test – well, in containers with caps on them and valves, so I could shake them up and get distribution between the organic and the aqueous. And this time, the solvent that I was interested in was di-2-ethyl hexaphosphoric acid, the same one that the people at West Chicago were using for their error separation. Now, they got all their advice and everything from the man at Argonne who had started out with TBP. He was their consultant.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Where were Argonne Laboratories? In Illinois, right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: We went down there.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes. That’s where I went for the conference. Originally it was at the university campus, then they moved out there where they could build reactors and do other things and have lots of space. But for the rest of the time I was there, I worked on those elements, and one reason for doing these was that one method suggested for getting rid of the activity – see, these things need to be stored. They’re active, and they keep their activity for many many years, or some of them do, and we have the problem of –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: About how many years?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, plutonium-239, for example, is twenty-four thousand years. Plutonium-240 is fourteen hundred and forty years, I think. Curium-244 is eighteen years, 242 is only two years, or something like that, which means that if you have very much of it, it’s extremely radioactive.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: The longer the half-life, the less radioactive it is?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes, because your atoms last longer, so you can have less of it within a given time. Somebody thought of getting rid of these heavier elements, that is, transplutoniums, by putting them back in a reactor and essentially burning them up. They absorb neutrons until they get up to an element which undergoes fission. Uranium-235 is not the only isotope that undergoes fission. A lot of these heavier elements do. So then they’d go down to very low elements, which decay immediately or rather fast to stable elements, and that way you’d eventually get rid of it. You’d have to put these in a reactor, use some of your reactor capacity, but that still seemed practical, but they occur, they’re produced by reactors which also produce the fission products, including lots of rare earths, so that most of your material is the lanthanides instead of that, and this means it uses up much more space in the reactor, and that tends to make it impractical. So they decided, well, we’ll separate the transplutoniums from the rare earths. For many years, my work was directed toward finding better ways to do that. The first method that I had a lot to do with the development of, I was working on at the same time that a friend of mine was doing it, or someone in the Analytical Chemistry Division was doing it, and I didn’t know he was working on it until he published it. Oh, until someone gave me a copy of a paper that he had submitted to Analytical Chemistry. [laughter] And he got the patent on it. But I was, yes, I was working on it. Well, I went to work on it in more detail and someone else – I was still at Y-12, and someone at X-10, though, who was in Chem Tech Division also worked on it, and we published some things together, or got out an ORNL report and later some publication. And that involved using amine, which is an organic ammonia compound. You attach NH-2 derived from NH-3 ammonia to an organic radical from petroleum. In this case, instead of having concentrated nitric or hydrochloric acid, you have concentrated lithium chloride. I mean, really concentrated; it has to be almost all it will hold. Well, that we developed into a process that was actually put in the plant and used for quite a while. Oh, the main reason for its use, though, was to produce californium, to get these away from the rare earths. It wasn’t for storage or disposal, to put them back, but people wanted californium. In fact, it was thought for a long while there’d be lots and lots of uses for californium-252. It is used to some extent.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What did they use it for?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: One use that’s fairly common is to put it down an oil well that’s being drilled to – and then a counter close to it, to determine absorption. Radioactivity and its extent of absorption gives you a picture of the density and composition of the materials between the counter and the activity. Californium-252 has a half-life of only two-and-a-half years, also. Well, it’s still being produced. People at Savannah River Laboratory had a really large plant. People at X-10 had a smaller plant, and they put plutonium and later the curium that was produced at Savannah River into the Oak Ridge isotope reactor, which has the highest neutron flux in the United States, to go on up and up through one element after another. There’s a lot of fission takes place, so that you have fifteen-one-hundredths of – well, you have one-and-a-half percent of – putting in plutonium-240, you have only one-and-a-half percent of that material left as californium when you get through, because the rest of it’s been destroyed on the way up or converted to something else, mostly fission. That was the first use for this method. But I looked for other ways to do it and tried a lot of ways, and so did Fred Kappelman, who was still working for me. And then one day he tried something else; he used a complexing agent and water – well, you may have heard of NTA [nitrilotriacetic acid], which was supposed to take the place of phosphate detergents. You know, they got worried about phosphates in the water. Well, this is related to that kind of – it’s a nitrogen compound, organic nitrogen compound. It’s a complex of solvent in water and it – well, we had one in addition to EDTA and some of these things are what was used in ion exchange, also, to separate rare earths. Fred decided to try one of these, the one that’s called DTPA. Well, EDTA is ethylene diamine triacetic acid. DTPA is diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid, and he put that in his aqueous solution, and there’s sodium salt of it, and contacted it with the di-2-ethylhexaphosphoric acid, and got distribution coefficients for the rare earths that are most like americium, and americium itself, and it was the difference of a hundred between the two. So we’ve spent a long time on that. We got the patent on that.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Yea! You could feed everybody for a long time.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and I also – Fred’s name comes first on the patent instead of mine. He was working with me, but this was his idea. But I invented the acronym – you know what acronyms are, you use letters to indicate words and things – I invented the acronym to describe this process, which is – and people all over the world – well, the process hasn’t been used much in this country. It was never put into our plant or anything, but the Russians use it and the Germans used it, at least for analytical purposes, and they even used the same name, my acronym – the Russians spell it differently, but pronounce it the same. I called it TALSPEAK, which stands for trivalent actinide lanthanide separation by phosphorus reagent extraction from aqueous komplexes, komplexes spelled with a K as the Germans do. [laughter] Believe it or not, the Germans and the Russians both call it TALSPEAK. It takes fewer letters to express it in Russian than it does in English, but – [laughter].
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I heard that that’s framed in the bedroom of your house, right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: The patent on it.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. So that’s what, well, even, I was still working on TALSPEAK process and some of its problems at the time I retired and even for some time after, so that tells you what I did through those years.
Mr. George Russell: And you were also looking for a disposal method?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, I guess you were out when I mentioned this. The disposal method was to take these transplutonium elements, which produced most of the activity. americium, and especially curium decays in a few years, but to take those and put them back in reactors and burn them up, get them up to higher and higher elements, which are fissionable, and then will go down to middle elements, around zirconium and those elements, which decay. Going to be maybe radioactive to start with, fission products are, but they decay to things that are not radioactive. That was the disposal method. Well, recently it’s been decided that that’s really not practical, but people spent a lot of time on it, even developing special reactors for that purpose. And we we’re not the only ones who – well, people have spent, I guess, more man hours on it than also working on the theory of all this stuff. But that was in the main, what they called partitioning [inaudible] to get – to decrease the mass that you had to put back in the reactor, because these transplutonium elements behaved chemically just like the lanthanides.
Mr. George Russell: What do you remember of Cynthia when she was a youngster? What was she like? This one over here.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] Well, she wasn’t a whole lot of problem. No, nope, she wasn��t.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: You were saying today that – when did I walk first?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: As I remember, the first steps you ever took were when we were in the dentist’s office in Knoxville, and your mother was having her teeth worked on, and I was sitting there with you and you got up and took your first steps. Well you were born in August, and I think that was in May. That’s when we went to Colorado, not later than August, as I said, I was telling – you didn’t hear that – I was telling her that the thing that I remember about that trip was her running around the yard in front of my parents’ house with nothing on.
Mr. George Russell: What?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] Scandalizing everybody. So maybe that was a little problem. She was really having a good time. We didn’t care.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Did your parents care?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] I think they were a little bit [worried about] what the neighbors might think, because as you say, you had the same problem. But you weren’t a year old yet. You were about a year old. And you were not just sort of making steps; you were running.
Mr. George Russell: Took a lot of piano lessons.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, yeah, it was later. When she was very young, if we’d have a party at night, well, the people on Dixie Lane, you know, the ladies who had their parties for year after year – well, they’ve just about come to an end now. Once in a while we did go out to the Lollies here not long ago and the Stiefs were there, but most of the people, well, some of them are dead and the Kings moved away to Morristown. But I remember we were across the street when you were a couple years older, no older than that, and you would determine not to go to sleep so long as those parties were going on. You were up and just as much alive as everybody else, even at midnight.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I wasn’t a real shy little girl.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: No, you weren’t, and I can’t remember that you ever talked baby talk. We just, we didn’t talk baby talk to you, so you never learned. Of course, your children, the same way.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: When I first started taking piano lessons, how old was I then? Do you remember?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: No, I don’t.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I wonder how I reacted to the lessons. I was always a tomboy, wasn’t I?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and you used to climb up in the – now, I can’t understand how you got up in that dogwood tree. One of those two dogwood trees that’s right back of our house when the top is a way up there – I mean, the first branching is a way up there, I know, and I don’t –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I’ll tell you how I did it; I still remember. Between the two forks, I just wedged myself between them.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, but how did you get up – well, I thought you were lower down than that. That’s what bothers me.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Well, we��ll let Melissa try it when she’s there.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, well, I’m sure the tree has grown some. And you know that maple tree, just to the east side of our porch, well she jumped over it at one time, because I planted it.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: We used to play croquet on that side of the house. There was grass on that hill at one point, no rocks, grass.
Mr. George Russell: Is that right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: It really was different. And we had Jewish neighbors on this side. Tell me about the Schwartzes a little bit.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The Schwartzes. Well, I’ve forgotten just when the Schwartzes came there. Do you remember? They had two children, Alan and Raina. Raina is Melissa’s age and Alan was older, but he was younger than you.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Maybe my age or a year younger.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I’m sure he was a little younger, yeah. And Melissa and Raina fought all the time, too. Now they’re good friends, but they��re a long ways apart. Raina is in Israel, an Israeli citizen. Her father was a biologist who was chiefly interested in the biology of maize, and he had his own little corn field in Oak Ridge. He didn’t know anything practical about corn, but he knew all about its biology. But he moved, got a job – well, first, they had a year in Israel. And that’s the year that Frank Fenimore lived – you remember the Fenimores?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Yeah, they lived next door to us, right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: For a year, they lived there, and he at Southern Illinois University and came down to the Biology Department for a year while the Schwartzes were in Israel. Did you know that Fenimore died? Yeah, a little over a month ago. He last year went to – he was fifty-four years old at that time, but he entered the Episcopal seminary, University of the South. He was originally a Roman Catholic, and when they lived next to us, she was a Baptist, and I don’t know why we never thought that they might be interested in going to St. Stephen’s, but after they moved – oh, he stayed up in Illinois then for a year or two and then came back to Biology Division. Then all at once, they began coming to St. Stephen’s and became very active members of it. The Schwartzes went to Bloomington. There had been – she had a heart problem. She’s still alive, still has heart problems and in very bad shape part of the time. Alan was walking to school one morning when he just dropped dead, like that.
Mr. George Russell: The son.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. They don’t know why, but Raina, I don’t know where she went to school, but anyway, Caroline and Melissa had kept contact with them. Raina was recently back – well, we’d heard at one time she was going to stay in the states, but she went back to Israel, and she was back on a visit recently, and Pearl called Caroline and inquired about Melissa. And so she called Melissa, and Melissa called Raina the next weekend and Raina spent the night over with Melissa.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What were some of the things we did with the Schwartzes. I can remember going to Alan’s bar mitzvah.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh yes, we did. I didn’t remember whether you went to it. That’s the only time I’ve been in that building.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: We celebrated some of the Jewish feasts with them. Did we go to Passover with them once, or was it Hanukah one evening we went over?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I don’t remember.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I remember being jealous that they got presents for seven days in a row or something like that for Hanukah. Every night the present would get bigger and better, and I had to wait for Christmas. I didn’t think that was at all fair. I wanted to be Jewish. But Alan and I played a lot together. I remember we would run through the woods. I must have been outside most of the time when I was playing. We would go down to the woods that were behind Eastern Hill and climb trees in there and play make-up games whenever we played.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF BOYD WEAVER
Interviewed by Cynthia (Weaver) Russell
With George Russell
ca. 1992
[Tape 2] [Editor’s note: We have begun the transcript with Tape 2 because the audio cassette labels conflict with the natural order of subjects in the interview. The recording appears to begin while the interview is in progress.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: About sixty of the elements in nature, not including those that are made artificially by fission in reactors, have stable isotopes, or isotopes with very long half-lives. They’re not all completely stable. For example, the potassium, which we have in our body, over time has one one-hundredth of a percent of potassium-40, which has a half-life of a billion years. There’s not a lot of activity there. We’ve counted beta or gamma activity of potassium, and that potassium decay is one of chief sources of all the [inaudible], because it has inside – the elements uranium and thorium produce a lot of [inaudible] too. They have half lives much longer than a billion years. Now, to get back to the so-called stable elements, the even numbered elements in the periodic table have more isotopes than the odd numbered elements.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Was that known when the table was set up?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, they didn’t know about isotopes when the table was first set up. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Aston and Lindemann made an isotope separator and found there were two isotopes at least on neon. They split them off in different directions, and they discovered that they were isotopes, and then they began looking for isotopes of other elements. Well, they [went] through the periodic table, and for example, hydrogen has two isotopes, one or two. There may be an exception to that. Helium has a mass of four, and we don’t say it has an isotope, but it has a nuclide which has a mass of four. The next element is lithium, which has two isotopes. Its number seven mass is much more above a six mass, ninety-seven-and-a-half percent and two-and-a-half percent.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Now, what are you talking about?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: For hydrogen, this means hydrogen-1 and deuterium.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Okay, you’re talking about extra protons?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, both hydrogens have one proton, and hydrogen-2 has a neutron with it. Hydrogen-1 has no neutron. In the case of lithium, there are three protons and three or four neutrons. Beryllium is all one mass. Though in our isotope separation program, we once did separate 9 from 10. 10 was radioactive; it had been produced in the reactor. There was material in the reactor that contained beryllium, and after being there a long while radiated with neutrons, somebody started trying to find out something about beryllium-10, so we separated the isotopes of beryllium-9 and 10, got very little of 10, of course, and then it was not anywhere near pure. There was enough 10 that its radioactivity – I don’t know what its half-life is, but it’s enough to keep quite a while. It’s very low, it’s a very long half-life, it wasn’t very radioactive. I found a friend at the lab who was doing a lot of work on counting, and we went over to his place and put it in the counter, and determined the energy of beryllium-10. This was published about 1949.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What did the beryllium look like?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, beryllium is a metal that looks like aluminum. It has an oxide which is white powder. It is deposited in these pockets as a metal, like every other metal that’s in the calutron. But that metal had – there were other things with it, so that had to be put in solution and then purified chemically and converted to the oxide. [inaudible] The next element is boron, and it has one mass, and then there’s carbon. One percent of all the carbon in the world is carbon-13; the rest is carbon-12. There are other ways to separate carbon; you can put carbon dioxide through a thermal diffusion device. Since there’s so much carbon around everywhere, we didn’t trying separating that with the magnetic process, but we could have. The next one is nitrogen; it’s a gas and does not fit in with hydrogen or – well, we talked about separating it, but it can be separated by thermal diffusion also.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What is thermal diffusion?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: In thermal diffusion you have – the usual thing is a tube which has a very – well, it’s a complex of tubes, one inside another. The first plant that I worked at in Oak Ridge for a week, I told you about that, for a week was thermal diffusion. It had a pipe in the center that was fifteen hundred pound steam, so it was very, very hot. Then there was a hundredth of an inch between that and the next pipe, which had cold water running through it. You can do this thing for the family of gases, and when the gas moves slowly through it, the gas at the outer side may have a little higher content of one of the isotopes than the other one. The heavier one goes to the outside. [inaudible] They are set up in a cascade. There are isotope separation devices outside of it like a magnetic process. The series of stages are called a cascade. As I told you, a stream is several – you don’t call a straight fall a cascade. A cascade is a stream of water that makes several jumps to get to the bottom. [inaudible] Well then the next one is oxygen. [inaudible]
Mr. George Russell: Excuse me, but I’m having a hard time understanding what you’re doing right now. I don’t know why we’re talking about the periodic table.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, because my work had to do with separating the isotopes of the elements in the periodic table, but then I will get into the, later, into the –
Mr. George Russell: Early years of Oak Ridge?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. I’m going into the periodic table and the effect that it has on the difficulty of getting the elements when I get down to a certain group.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Was your assignment just to separate the isotopes of all the elements of the table?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The Electromagnetic Separation Department was [inaudible]. They no longer were using the electromagnetic process for separating uranium isotopes, but they took the experimental, a small plant, there were two at least, and one was larger than the other, could have been used as a pilot plant to test things before equipment would be used in the big plant with a hundred-and-ninety-two units in a horseshoe, well, ninety-six in a horseshoe. There were two horseshoes in the building. [inaudible] So this is what those people did. Now, I didn’t do that work. I had the [inaudible]. We prepared the material that went into the calutrons and took pockets that, mega – material, separated isotopes in and whatever chemistry was necessary to get every other element without contaminating each other or with anything else that was the same element. For example, iron, there’s [inaudible] so you had to be very careful you didn’t get any in. Same thing is true for the other elements. Well, the only element so far that I��ve mentioned that has isotopes is lithium, and we did that. Then we get down, well, in the Periodic Table, you have, well, you have two elements in the first series and eight in the next going across this way, and eight in the third, and then after that there were eighteen in each, each group. When you go across that way, the difference in these elements is what you might call a qualitative difference. They’re definitely different elements that have different properties. They may be metals, on the left side of the table, or the elements on the other side which will combine [inaudible] with hydrogen or with metals, basically. [inaudible] is certainly different from magnesium, for example. It’s a metal. When you go down the other way, the differences are what you’d call quantitative. There’s not so very much difference between lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium. Chemically, they’re all alkali metals. You put these metals in water and you get, well, with sodium, you’d get what we call lye. And the others would do the same thing. It happens that, and you might usually think that if you get higher and higher, atomic weights would have higher melting points. In this case, it’s the reverse direction. Lithium is considered to have a much higher melting point than sodium. Potassium is still lower, and they become more active as you go down. You put sodium in water and you hold it still, it will produce hydrogen, and it’s a fact that it may catch fire. You put a little potassium in water, it catches fire. The hydrogen [inaudible]. And cesium’s even more so. And then in the case of the next group, there are the alkaline earths, beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium, and radium, and they are somewhat less active in their bases, but calcium – but you can make sodium hydroxide by putting calcium hydroxide in a sodium chloride solution, except of course for the difference in solubilities that they have [inaudible]. And that is true all the way across the table until, now I’m moving a long ways. Well, let’s see, I might go back. But we separated, there’s some other things that I did that were covered. We separated potassium isotopes. There were two isotopes, 49 and 40, and as I said 40 was only 1/100th percent. But I was interested in – 40 was radioactive, and I was interested in [inaudible]. He was interested in doing this. Well, it was the same person who tried beryllium later. [inaudible] P. R. Bell. Was it a Bell boy? No, I’m not sure, but [inaudible].
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Why were they interested the [inaudible] metals? Why did that [inaudible]?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, these are just things that you get free from doing the work over there. I had the storage of all these isotopes too when they got them purified, and this is [inaudible] you pick up; these are the things that couldn’t be done. When there’s only 1/100th of a percent, you really can’t get enough activity compared to – with all the background activity you have – to get a good figure for the energy; it was too slow. But when we enhanced it some, I guess it was still only less than 2/10th of a percent that we got out of that pocket. I think the other – later, they did much better than that, but I got to working on it and so we did [inaudible].
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: And the beta energy is what?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, you have alpha, beta, and gamma rays, and for a specific isotope, radioisotope, you have a certain [inaudible]. The alpha energy is very definite to a hundredth of a, well, most of these were up in the millions of volts of energy very definite to two thousand volts [inaudible]. In the case of beta, they had a distribution of –it goes like this and comes to a maximum energy at the top of this curve, where most of them are, and you’ve got the time of the [inaudible]. We had to compare this to something else, too, that was going on, in order to get it. But they didn’t know as much about measuring, so they had to take this [inaudible]. But anyway, they determined that the energy of this was about 1.4 million volts, electron volts. And P. R. Bell also was in it, you know. What’s the energy? What’s the gamma energy? Maybe somebody could do that. I prepared the material for them, about a kilogram of potassium carbonate, natural potassium carbonate. You put it in a can, fitted it to this detecting device. He would make [inaudible]. It would pick up the radiation, [inaudible] radiation and convert it to light, which then could be picked up by a photo [inaudible] and with devices added to that, you could tell what the energy – the strength of those light pulses was proportional to the energy of the radiation. Now they’ve improved this to a very high science, but at that time things were still crude, but he was making materials that would do this. Well, most of these things, we could get – we could buy most of the elements. We could buy [inaudible], until they got down to one group of elements and they said you have qualitative differences across, and you have quantitative differences going down, difference in magnitude, until we get down to element 57. Now, these differences depend on the arrangement of the electrons in the shells, so [inaudible]. The boundary for a shell is the probability that an electron will be in a certain place at a certain time. You can call them shells. The chemical properties of an element depend on the number of electrons out in those shells. As that increases up to eight, why, properties change. You get down to element 57, lanthanum, and then start adding electrons to it, the effective electrons that determine its chemistry are not in the outer shell, but farther down in. So therefore, the addition of one electron does not make very much difference in the chemistry. And if you keep adding them, that difference between them becomes less and less, so that the differences between these elements, 57 to 70, the [inaudible], are no longer qualitative differences that make them separate but quantitative differences, slight differences, very slight, and they become closer and closer together as you get up through the series. Now, there are some exceptions. Cerium can be oxidized so that [inaudible]. It���s like titanium or zirconium. Titanium, zirconium, and hafnium are somewhat similar, going down the table. [inaudible] when it’s oxidized. Otherwise, it’s trivalent and behaves like a trivalent element. Aluminum is in that same group, but there’s quite a bit of difference between aluminum and the first element is lanthanum, and then there’s cerium and praseodymium, neodymium, and then there was an element missing from nature, promethium, which was made – about six percent of the elements at are produced by fission of uranium in the reactor is promethium. This element was discovered and named at Oak Ridge, which people don’t know, you know. They called it promethium because, well, Prometheus was the Greek god who got fire to their area. We had fission, brings us a new fire. And here’s an element that was not in nature but was now produced in the series. And one of the – well, there were two elements that were missing by that time. Well, going on up there’s samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium.
Mr. George Russell: Are those all in the Periodic Table?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh yeah, those are all natural elements. They become increasingly rare if you go up through the series.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Except that – but in addition to that, any odd element is much rarer than the even element immediately following it. So you really have two series, the even elements and the odd elements through the series. Most of these have isotopes. Four or five of them have seven each. And there’s one of them, neodymium has an even numbered isotope which should be there because every even number for a series, at least four even numbers, the isotope – there’s a vacant space for an even element, an even isotope. Well, with all these elements, praseodymium, terbium, thulium do not have any isotopes. [inaudible] And the others all do have. The odd elements have only two. There aren’t – well, masses also. No, lanthanum has an even number for the mass. europium has151 and 153, and lutetium is 168 and 170, I believe. No, higher, 175 and 176.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Which ones of those elements did you work with, the isotopes?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, I was responsible for getting the raw materials for these.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: For all of them?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Wow.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, so I started inquiring about where, buying rare earths. I knew that the situation was very discouraging. We could buy all the cerium we wanted. It came out of Lindsay Chemical Plant in West Chicago.
Mr. George Russell: West Chicago?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Your new neighbor, another plant next to where you live in West Chicago.
Mr. George Russell: On Bingham?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Plant on –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Right up on the hill. They cut off the [inaudible] Sound.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I didn’t know there was a hill. Well, in those days, there was only the old plant. They built a big one later.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Right back of the school.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, on – what’s the name of the street?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Hah! I knew it.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, it was – by the time you lived there, it was American Potash. It was only two blocks from your house or less. [inaudible]
Mr. George Russell: Which house, the [inaudible] house?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The townhouse.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: If you went across the pinnacle, kept on going through, you’d come right out [inaudible].
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and I guess we bought our lanthanum from there too. As I said, cerium can be oxidized, so it wasn’t hard to get it pure, separated from lanthanum. And there’s quite a lot of difference, then, between lanthanum and – well, lanthanum and cerium could be bought in kilogram quantities. We decided that we really needed a kilogram of the oxide [inaudible] you usually get of each of the elements that have isotopes in order to prepare enough, produce enough in putting it through the calutrons to do anything with it. You can buy that much cerium or more and that much lanthanum. We separated those, and we also got neodymium. It probably cost several hundred dollars per kilogram. [inaudible] much cheaper. In January 1948 I went to a [inaudible] conference –
[Tape 1, Side B]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: There’s features on physics and rare earth elements, one on magnetism and the other one on – oh, I’ve forgotten what was accepted. He was a very good speaker, but I heard him give the same speech then sixteen years later too. But I heard someone say as we were leaving the lecture hall, what was donated was a way to separate rare earth. It was true. And I did learn something about – oh, I talked with a friend of mine, of course a person whom I’d just met there who was from Los Angeles who had a small rare earth company, and I inquired him about getting a kilogram of one of these heavier rare earths. He says, “Well, we have about a kilogram of a mixture which I would sell you for three thousand dollars, but this is a mixture of all the elements above neodymium. It would be mostly samarium and then less gadolinium and so on up. They weren’t separated; it was a mixture. In May, I took a trip, inquiring about the possibility of getting rare earths. The first place I went to was Chicago. I’d met the head of the research lab at the Replicator meeting, Howard Kramers, and he showed me around his lab. He didn’t give much promise of ever being able to produce anything. By that time both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Iowa State, Ames Laboratory, had found a way of separating rare earths, which greatly improved the method. Before that it had been done by crystallization, fractional crystallization. You take a salt, you take a mixture of a rare earth salt with another salt, which would produce a double salt that would crystallize out, the crystallized part of it. The example [is] magnesium rare earth nitrate. The lighter elements will give you a double salt which is less soluble than that of the heavier elements. So therefore you get partial separation in making one precipitation. You can take those two fractions and break them up into two and those into two more and you get eight, and then you can work them back and forth across there, taking parts that are most alike. And people have gone to hundreds or even more than a thousand fractionations to try to get some of the heavier elements and they still had only milligrams, and they weren’t that pure. And that was the state of separation for the heavier rare earths at that time. They did a lot of fractional crystallization at West Chicago Plant. The whole plant was based on that except for the cerium separation. That was the old plant. But people at Oak Ridge and at Ames – well, at Oak Ridge, a method was discovered, ion exchange. You have beads of a resin, which when treated with sulfuric acid, the sulfate ion sticks out here and will attract metals, hold them on the surface, and the rare earths are among those elements which, going down through the series, and this is what they applied it to first really, go down through the series, lanthanum will come out first and then go right up through the series, that more and more difficult to come out, so that way you get separation. Now, the way they did it at Oak Ridge, there’s still overlap. The concentration you get out of each one of them, you have a probability curve coming out. There’s a little bit here, and then up through, and then a tail behind it. And the beginning of the next one overlaps that, and so on down through the series. And that’s the way they separated promethium from other stuff, by putting it on one of these columns here. Well at Ames they later found that by raising the pH and doing some other things like that, they could stack these elements on top of another with a very clear division between them.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: In the glass columns, the glass columns that you could see.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. Of course if you had only a very little bit of an element, it wouldn’t come out very pure because there’d be some overlapping out on the edge. But they were beginning to develop this, and were producing considerable quantities of the lightest elements. They hadn’t gone very far yet, but they were doing this. Well, Howard Kramers told me that he would never use ion exchange because the pure water that you had to have cost too much, so they would stick with what they were doing. I went on up to Ames and talked with the director of the Ames laboratory, and of course he showed me around, and I saw that they were doing an ion exchange. As I say, they hadn’t gone very far. Well I did, though, while I was at West Chicago, ordered a kilogram of samarium oxide, which they produced, had never done this before, had produced that kilogram of samarium oxide, charged me six hundred dollars. Howard later told me they lost money on it. It was supposed to be about ninety-eight percent pure. At Ames, the director showed me a hundred grams that he had of europium oxide. It’s the rarest of the rare earths, unless lutetium is the rarer. But it can be reduced to a valence of two and three, so it should be separated if you reduce it. If you contact it at a very low acidity, say in citric acid or acetic acid with mercury, the mercury will take up the europium, and it will also take the samarium with it and ytterbium. You can keep the europium at the solution, but you can’t keep the other two, so that way you can get those separated too. Which limited us to a kilogram which had been given to him by a professor at University of Illinois where Howard Kramers had done his undergraduate and graduate work and got his Ph.D. on rare earths, and he was very proud of that. Well, eventually I also ordered from Howard Kramers a mixture of rare earths which had twenty-five percent samarium and a lesser percent gadolinium and a little bit of the others, and we went to work on that. We tried fractional crystallization; we couldn’t get the right kind of crystals to come down. Magnesium nitrate. I called Howard and told him so; he sent me a little envelope with some crystals in it, which I used as seed crystals, and then we could get lanthanide crystals. His lab had these in the air and everywhere, but until you had a seed crystal, you’d never get that kind of crystal. [laughter]
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Really?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: That’s right. You remember Fred Kaplan; you babysat for his children, didn’t you?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Yeah.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, well, he and I did most of the work on other things, and we did have some other people who came and went on the work that he was on, were stuck with moving on with strong rare earths. We got crystals out of it, but it still was extremely slow. We didn’t get very far. Soon after that, I heard that there was another way to separate rare earths, and then at Argonne Laboratory, which was then at the University of Chicago campus, had a way to separate them by solvent extraction. You take an organic compound, which at that time he diluted with a petroleum product, and contact that with a phosphate compound, tributyl phosphate [TBP]. Butyl is C4H9, and have that attached to phosphate, PO4. It’s a liquid, lighter or about the same density as water. The rare earths are extracted by this from very strong hydrochloric or nitric acid. You have to have really concentrated hydrochloric or very high concentration of nitric acid. You have your rare earths in that; the TBP will take a higher fraction of the heavier elements, a greater distribution of the heavier rare earths than it does the lighter ones. So you can work out a fractional method this way.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What kind of stuff would you have to wear when you were working on that?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, you wear gloves.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Made out of what?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Rubber. Well, you’d just be careful, and you get, you’d have nitric acid burns on your fingers.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What about breathing the fumes?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The final plant that we put up with – what we call – with eighty-five mixer settlers, each of which had a one hundred horsepower motor on it, with liquids flowing from one to the other in both directions and going down through the middle, we could smell nitric acid all the time, because there were leaks in the covers on these things. We had to have stirrers going down through holes, and gases could come up, so it wasn’t a very pleasant place to work, but we worked at this for years.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Now I saw that, I think, didn’t I? Or something like that. Anyway, I saw columns at the lab.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, that was at X-10. You never got into the Y-12.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: All right. Could have been. Was that – is the same thing I saw is what you’re talking about?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well it could be done with columns, or were those ion exchange columns? No, at X-10, I didn’t have any ion exchange columns. I don’t remember.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I remember the door through the left. You could take – where you worked with rubber gloves and a window.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Glass chamber?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and a hood with –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: In the center of the room, there were columns. On the right wall, there was more stuff. It’s been so long that I can’t remember, but it seems like there were long columns there.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well we had these on the wall next to the room where the isotope separators were finally. Oh, well you did get into Y-12.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I did.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Okay, and liquids ran back and forth.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: It was incredible. I remember I was very impressed.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Of course all you can do with that is on the basis of what you know about their distribution coefficients, which acidity and relative flow rates of the liquids so that you split between two elements. You have everything below that going one way, and everything together on going through once, except that we did put a total reflex on both ends of it on a batch so this one that we were talking about first was continuous. You feed in in the middle, and it goes both ways and they come out, but all you can do is split between the two. You can separate all elements separately. So then you have to take this end fraction and go and work on it again. But what we did with double reflex on it was to just put a batch of quite a lot of material and work that back and forth a while so they were distributed across the rare earths. In fact the stuff in the reflexer on one end was thirty percent lutetium, even though it’s an extremely rare element. We’d put a lot of material in. Well, we had previously concentrated this. Well, anyway, first, we had rather crude equipment. We did have an extraction column. Well, at Y-12 before that, we had extraction columns as well as – well, that’s right. If you saw columns and these mixer settlers on the wall, that had to be in building 9731 at Y-12. And the calutrons were just – there wasn’t even a wall between them. There was an opening between that and the calutrons. So you did get in there. Yeah, well, that’s what it was. And we did use columns too for some of the work. I did use some columns out in another building. But anyway, that’s what that was for.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Let me ask you something else. When you got the things that came from the lab in Chicago, how did they ship them? What kind of containers?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, this was just oxides that were shipped in cardboard containers. Yeah, nothing but oxides in them. Before we went to 9731, I was up at 9207, 9211. Used to go quite a ways until I got moved out of there. Biology took over in the 1950s, we moved into 9211, and then this was down closer to the rest of the operations, so in ’53 and ’54 we went down to 9731, and that’s where the columns were put up.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: How did you do that?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, we didn’t have all those columns. Those were all made by the glass blowers, and they set them up. Kurt Kappelman and Lamar Royer did the work of setting up all those mixer settlers. That’s quite a change from Lamar Royer’s teaching physics at Oak Ridge High School. [laughter] But as a result of that, Lamar Royer spent four years in West Chicago too. [laughter] Later. But anyway, while we were still at 9211, then a crude way and just taking things in flasks and putting them back and forth, [Krebb?] and one or two other people working with him, mostly [Krebb’s?] work, produced a kilogram of ninety-five percent gadolinium oxide, which nobody had ever done before, not that much, at least I thought so. I went to an American Chemical Society meeting in Atlantic City and gave a paper on this, and then Howard Kramers told me that he and Ron, who was there with him, had produced a kilogram from fractional crystallization. But they did that only because I’d gotten them interested in doing it. And then later we made several kilograms of gadolinium. When we got to disclosing, it was much more difficult. But by combining that with our solvent extraction, we did get considerable amounts of some of these elements. But about this time, people became more – well, the Ames people made larger and larger quantities. The people in California put up columns. I also talked them into – I got a trip to California ’cause I talked them into using solvent extraction. I went out the day they were ready to set it up. But I did an awfully dumb thing. You had to have pumps to pump the electrodes and the equipment was glass, glass columns with glass pipes, tubes going up from it, this small tube, and they connected that small tube to the pump with a solid connection instead of having a flexible rubber tube. As soon as they started up, the vibrations broke it, so I didn’t ever get to see them do anything. In fact they dropped the solvent extraction after all their trouble with doing it. I was their consultant for a while. But eventually, guess who had the largest ion exchange columns in the world. Howard Kramers. He said he would never use ion exchange because getting pure water would be too expensive. And in that old building, we had forty-eight inch columns. You know that night that I was there when you were supervising a high school party in the high school at midnight? What was his name, the other couple? His wife was a good friend of yours. He didn’t go to church. At midnight, he took me over to the old plant. He said if he had to go through channels, it would have taken a year, and probably then refused to get me into the plant, but he took me over there.
Mr. George Russell: Did he work there?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes, he worked in the plant. Yes, at midnight. They’d never even admitted to anyone that they used solvent extraction.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I didn’t realize that that was such a hush-hush thing.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: First thing that I saw was these columns, forty-eight inches in diameter and twenty feet high made out of ceramics that they were using to separate rare earth. You know, he said they’d never do it. Before I saw those, though, I’ve seen columns two feet in diameter at St. Louis, Michigan, the Michigan chemical company [Michigan Chemical Corporation]. I was their consultant for a while too, and I talked them into using solvent extraction and they used a different extraction from what I had used and had a big project on the thing. The reason that they were doing this, the reason they had all this was because for a while there were plans to have a nuclear powered aircraft, and the reactor was to have –
Mr. George Russell: An aircraft carrier?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Airplane, aircraft, yeah, not a carrier, but aircrafts, an aircraft, oh yeah. The trouble was that it had to be so long to be safe for the personnel, and it would have to have so much shielding that it could never go more than three hundred miles an hour, and probably not that, so after spending millions and millions of dollars on this, they gave it up. But the reactor, experimental reactor was in Oak Ridge. They were going to use yttrium. Now, I didn’t mention the fact that yttrium, which is element 39, lanthanum is 57, it’s 39, it’s in the same family column and has chemistry like the heavier rare earths, like erbium. It would be very difficult to separate from erbium and thulium. But yttrium does not absorb neutrons to speak of, so they were going to use yttrium hydride in a part of the reactor, and they had to have very, very pure yttrium. One part per million of gadolinium would spoil it. There were various plans made to get pure yttrium. The people at West Chicago were doing the best they could with ion exchange, and then they shifted to St. Louis, Michigan and – no, they had ion exchange too, but I think part of it came from West Chicago before that. So I saw their columns once. And we were up in Akron for a vacation, why, went on up to West Chicago and St. Louis, Michigan, and I’d been there before and that’s what got me interested in solvent extraction.
Mr. George Russell: Where did you meet this Howard Kramers?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, he must have been at the rare earth conference in Phoenix in ’64.
Mr. George Russell: Where did you meet him in West Chicago?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, at the high school party. We were chaperones at a party, and he and his wife were also chaperones, so you should be able to remember who they were. You two couples were the only chaperones.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I can’t even remember – was it a church group we chaperoned for?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes. I think they were more involved in it than that. And remember when I went over to Chicago to pick Melissa up and got back late because I got on the wrong road, headed for Minneapolis?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Oh, no!
Mr. Boyd Weaver: And got out past the airport. Coming back I asked the man at the toll booth how to get to West Chicago; he said, “You’re in it now.” He didn’t know there was a city of West Chicago. But anyway, at midnight that night, he took me in, first showed me these columns and then he showed me their solvent extraction system. Well, they were not using tributyl phosphate, they were using di-2-ethylhexal phosphoric acid, which uses very dilute hydrochloric acid, and would separate rare earths that way. And what they were doing, even with the big ion exchange columns, they were interested then in making gadolinium more than anything else because there was a special use for gadolinium for shielding. It was for TVs. Originally, the greatest improvement ever made in the early days in TV color was to use europium oxide on the screen. That made europium very much needed, quite a demand for it, and as I said, Spudding showed me one hundred grams. Only, in our program, solvent extraction, we produced six hundred grams of pure europium oxide, because it could be reduced to a valence of two and joined with mercury and then washed out, separated from the rare earths. A little bit of gadolinium went along with it and samarium, but it could be taken out first. But we, back then, Professor Hopkins at University of Illinois by Long Lake –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: But what did you do with it?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, we separated the isotopes of europium with the material that we made. We also used that ninety-five percent gadolinium to separate the isotopes. Now when it came to other elements, after many years, the people at West Chicago were making, eventually, they made most of the elements, most of the earths. They made 99.9999% of individual rare earths and they made them in kilogram quantities. The lutetium we bought from them – I’m not sure whether we got a kilogram or a pound – it may have been only a pound – it was twenty-three hundred dollars. But we couldn’t have got a gram; ten years before that, you couldn’t have got a gram.
Granddaughter: Why did you go to see him at night instead of in the daytime?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Because he couldn’t have gotten permission from his bosses to get me in. They were always afraid that somebody – well, they were afraid of me because they thought I might talk to someone else who was a competitor of theirs.
Mr. George Russell: Was this guy in management then?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, in operations management.
Mr. George Russell: I do remember when you came up once you mentioned that someone you knew lived there.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: He also mentioned that the smell in the air was not good.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I saw nitric oxide cans still in that place.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Where did those come from?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh, probably when they ignited the nitrates that they made in the fractional crystallization. I mean this had been going on for fifty years or more, the old methods.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible: I didn’t know that anything was over there.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] He didn’t even know that American Potash was there, right? You mean you didn’t ever walk down far enough to see that plant? I found it right away.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible: That’s because I thought the plant was behind the road.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, you took me down there.
Mr. George Russell: [inaudible]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, well there wouldn’t be all the time anyway, but I did go out there once to see a little bit of things, but I never did see the new big plant that you see by Columbia. But that’s where high production is coming from, and it was that plant that was producing so much pollution that they went out of business.
[Tape 1, Side A]
[Editor’s note: The recording begins as the interview is in progress.]
Mr. Boyd Weaver: … that I got a bonus out of the samarium isotope separation, too. There’s seven isotopes in samarium. Samarium is radioactive, naturally radioactive, very low alpha activity, but nobody knew which one of the seven isotopes was active. A Dr. Dempster at the University of Chicago spent many, many years with his mass spectroscopes trying to find out – mass spectrograph, trying to find out what he would collect – he would put material through the mass spectrograph, which put it – each of the isotopes in a line like this and then take those materials and would run this for a long while, and of course he’d collect extremely small amounts in the mass spectrograph. He would collect – you don’t get anywhere near a milligram, and he would put these on photographic plates and leave them for a long while, hoping to determine them that way, which isotope was active. He published two or three times, and he changed his mind about which it was, but he wasn’t certain. Well, when we separated the isotopes, it was easy. Here we had all seven isotopes. They weren’t completely pure, but all I had to do was take a definite amount of each of these isotopes – this was a very few milligrams of each – put them in solution and put drops on a stainless steel plate, about so big, and dry them and then put them in an alpha counter and count the alpha activity. I could even – when I got these numbers together, it was very obvious that it was samarium-147. The amount of samarium-147 in each – the activity that I got from each of these seven plates was directly proportional to the percentage of 147 in each of these, except the 148 was a little high, and I should have been a little more careful about it. I thought, well, we usually make that mistake with low anyway, but it was a little higher than it should have been. So I published this in – or I submitted it to Physical Review for publication in the latter part of 1950. My letter got to somebody at the University of Chicago or Argonne before it came out and they sent me a letter asking me to not – well, I had mentioned Dempster’s work, but it made it sound as though I was giving light to his work. He was dead by that time, hadn’t been very long, and I got a request that I rewrite this. He had spent his life’s work on trying to find these out. After he died, they found on his desk a paper which said he was now certain that it was 147, but he’d never published it. Well this made my paper about two weeks late. When it came out, there was also a paper from somebody at the University of California or one of the other California schools also reporting that it was 147, but they had done it a different way. They had actually made, in a cyclotron, had made enough 147, enough of different ones of these, that they found out that 147 was active, was alpha active, so we published at the same time. Years later, I saw in one of the more recent isotope charts that 148 is also active, but very much less so. Its half-life is – well, that of 147 is something like a hundred billion years. This one is even longer. Maybe it’s ten billion and a hundred billion. And that made me think, then, if I’d been a little more careful, I could have said that 148 might also be active and should have because of that little slightly higher number, but I didn’t. [laughter] At the same time, though, that I published it, somebody had also said that 148 might be active, or they disagreed on my finding. I didn’t see how they could. My numbers were certain that 147 was anyway. But this is the thing that I got –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: They were publishing on 148 and you were on 147, huhn?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, so that was just a bonus, to get the isotopes separated. Well, that’s about enough for the so-called lanthanides, because it begins with lanthanum; you’ve got these fifteen elements. But about the time that I changed over, then, to Chemical Technology Division in ’58, I got into working with other elements. I did work on solvent extraction. It was practically all solvent extraction from then on, solvent extraction of neptunium. I did a big project on neptunium and published the paper in a journal called Chemical Engineering Data. I didn’t know where I wanted to publish it, but that’s where the publishers put it. Not very many people read it compared to what read a journal that’s called Inorganic Chemistry. If I had gotten my paper written a year or so sooner, I could have been published in Inorganic Chemistry, because I had a friend who was editor of that paper, and he had encouraged me to do it, but I wanted to get some more information before I published it. The editor at the time that I submitted it, the University of Colorado didn’t know anything about solvent extraction or the transplutonium elements. We call these the transplutonium elements, beyond plutonium. Again, you have a series of elements with very similar chemistry. There’s very little difference as you go up through the series. Well, neptunium is different, but beyond plutonium, they are trivalent for a ways, and the chemistry is very similar. But not only that, they’re very similar to the lanthanides. This is americium, curium, berkelium, californium, and einsteinium. And then when they get to mendelevium, they begin to be slightly different, but still somewhat the same. So my interest, then, later became those elements after I’d published neptunium.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: And those are all radioactive.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: They’re all very radioactive.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Were you using mechanical hands when you were working with these?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Nope, this was all done at tracer level, so that I could do it in little test – well, in containers with caps on them and valves, so I could shake them up and get distribution between the organic and the aqueous. And this time, the solvent that I was interested in was di-2-ethyl hexaphosphoric acid, the same one that the people at West Chicago were using for their error separation. Now, they got all their advice and everything from the man at Argonne who had started out with TBP. He was their consultant.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Where were Argonne Laboratories? In Illinois, right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: We went down there.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes. That’s where I went for the conference. Originally it was at the university campus, then they moved out there where they could build reactors and do other things and have lots of space. But for the rest of the time I was there, I worked on those elements, and one reason for doing these was that one method suggested for getting rid of the activity – see, these things need to be stored. They’re active, and they keep their activity for many many years, or some of them do, and we have the problem of –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: About how many years?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Well, plutonium-239, for example, is twenty-four thousand years. Plutonium-240 is fourteen hundred and forty years, I think. Curium-244 is eighteen years, 242 is only two years, or something like that, which means that if you have very much of it, it’s extremely radioactive.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: The longer the half-life, the less radioactive it is?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yes, because your atoms last longer, so you can have less of it within a given time. Somebody thought of getting rid of these heavier elements, that is, transplutoniums, by putting them back in a reactor and essentially burning them up. They absorb neutrons until they get up to an element which undergoes fission. Uranium-235 is not the only isotope that undergoes fission. A lot of these heavier elements do. So then they’d go down to very low elements, which decay immediately or rather fast to stable elements, and that way you’d eventually get rid of it. You’d have to put these in a reactor, use some of your reactor capacity, but that still seemed practical, but they occur, they’re produced by reactors which also produce the fission products, including lots of rare earths, so that most of your material is the lanthanides instead of that, and this means it uses up much more space in the reactor, and that tends to make it impractical. So they decided, well, we’ll separate the transplutoniums from the rare earths. For many years, my work was directed toward finding better ways to do that. The first method that I had a lot to do with the development of, I was working on at the same time that a friend of mine was doing it, or someone in the Analytical Chemistry Division was doing it, and I didn’t know he was working on it until he published it. Oh, until someone gave me a copy of a paper that he had submitted to Analytical Chemistry. [laughter] And he got the patent on it. But I was, yes, I was working on it. Well, I went to work on it in more detail and someone else – I was still at Y-12, and someone at X-10, though, who was in Chem Tech Division also worked on it, and we published some things together, or got out an ORNL report and later some publication. And that involved using amine, which is an organic ammonia compound. You attach NH-2 derived from NH-3 ammonia to an organic radical from petroleum. In this case, instead of having concentrated nitric or hydrochloric acid, you have concentrated lithium chloride. I mean, really concentrated; it has to be almost all it will hold. Well, that we developed into a process that was actually put in the plant and used for quite a while. Oh, the main reason for its use, though, was to produce californium, to get these away from the rare earths. It wasn’t for storage or disposal, to put them back, but people wanted californium. In fact, it was thought for a long while there’d be lots and lots of uses for californium-252. It is used to some extent.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What did they use it for?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: One use that’s fairly common is to put it down an oil well that’s being drilled to – and then a counter close to it, to determine absorption. Radioactivity and its extent of absorption gives you a picture of the density and composition of the materials between the counter and the activity. Californium-252 has a half-life of only two-and-a-half years, also. Well, it’s still being produced. People at Savannah River Laboratory had a really large plant. People at X-10 had a smaller plant, and they put plutonium and later the curium that was produced at Savannah River into the Oak Ridge isotope reactor, which has the highest neutron flux in the United States, to go on up and up through one element after another. There’s a lot of fission takes place, so that you have fifteen-one-hundredths of – well, you have one-and-a-half percent of – putting in plutonium-240, you have only one-and-a-half percent of that material left as californium when you get through, because the rest of it’s been destroyed on the way up or converted to something else, mostly fission. That was the first use for this method. But I looked for other ways to do it and tried a lot of ways, and so did Fred Kappelman, who was still working for me. And then one day he tried something else; he used a complexing agent and water – well, you may have heard of NTA [nitrilotriacetic acid], which was supposed to take the place of phosphate detergents. You know, they got worried about phosphates in the water. Well, this is related to that kind of – it’s a nitrogen compound, organic nitrogen compound. It’s a complex of solvent in water and it – well, we had one in addition to EDTA and some of these things are what was used in ion exchange, also, to separate rare earths. Fred decided to try one of these, the one that’s called DTPA. Well, EDTA is ethylene diamine triacetic acid. DTPA is diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid, and he put that in his aqueous solution, and there’s sodium salt of it, and contacted it with the di-2-ethylhexaphosphoric acid, and got distribution coefficients for the rare earths that are most like americium, and americium itself, and it was the difference of a hundred between the two. So we’ve spent a long time on that. We got the patent on that.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Yea! You could feed everybody for a long time.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and I also – Fred’s name comes first on the patent instead of mine. He was working with me, but this was his idea. But I invented the acronym – you know what acronyms are, you use letters to indicate words and things – I invented the acronym to describe this process, which is – and people all over the world – well, the process hasn’t been used much in this country. It was never put into our plant or anything, but the Russians use it and the Germans used it, at least for analytical purposes, and they even used the same name, my acronym – the Russians spell it differently, but pronounce it the same. I called it TALSPEAK, which stands for trivalent actinide lanthanide separation by phosphorus reagent extraction from aqueous komplexes, komplexes spelled with a K as the Germans do. [laughter] Believe it or not, the Germans and the Russians both call it TALSPEAK. It takes fewer letters to express it in Russian than it does in English, but – [laughter].
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I heard that that’s framed in the bedroom of your house, right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: The patent on it.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. So that’s what, well, even, I was still working on TALSPEAK process and some of its problems at the time I retired and even for some time after, so that tells you what I did through those years.
Mr. George Russell: And you were also looking for a disposal method?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, I guess you were out when I mentioned this. The disposal method was to take these transplutonium elements, which produced most of the activity. americium, and especially curium decays in a few years, but to take those and put them back in reactors and burn them up, get them up to higher and higher elements, which are fissionable, and then will go down to middle elements, around zirconium and those elements, which decay. Going to be maybe radioactive to start with, fission products are, but they decay to things that are not radioactive. That was the disposal method. Well, recently it’s been decided that that’s really not practical, but people spent a lot of time on it, even developing special reactors for that purpose. And we we’re not the only ones who – well, people have spent, I guess, more man hours on it than also working on the theory of all this stuff. But that was in the main, what they called partitioning [inaudible] to get – to decrease the mass that you had to put back in the reactor, because these transplutonium elements behaved chemically just like the lanthanides.
Mr. George Russell: What do you remember of Cynthia when she was a youngster? What was she like? This one over here.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] Well, she wasn’t a whole lot of problem. No, nope, she wasn��t.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: You were saying today that – when did I walk first?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: As I remember, the first steps you ever took were when we were in the dentist’s office in Knoxville, and your mother was having her teeth worked on, and I was sitting there with you and you got up and took your first steps. Well you were born in August, and I think that was in May. That’s when we went to Colorado, not later than August, as I said, I was telling – you didn’t hear that – I was telling her that the thing that I remember about that trip was her running around the yard in front of my parents’ house with nothing on.
Mr. George Russell: What?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] Scandalizing everybody. So maybe that was a little problem. She was really having a good time. We didn’t care.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Did your parents care?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: [laughter] I think they were a little bit [worried about] what the neighbors might think, because as you say, you had the same problem. But you weren’t a year old yet. You were about a year old. And you were not just sort of making steps; you were running.
Mr. George Russell: Took a lot of piano lessons.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, yeah, it was later. When she was very young, if we’d have a party at night, well, the people on Dixie Lane, you know, the ladies who had their parties for year after year – well, they’ve just about come to an end now. Once in a while we did go out to the Lollies here not long ago and the Stiefs were there, but most of the people, well, some of them are dead and the Kings moved away to Morristown. But I remember we were across the street when you were a couple years older, no older than that, and you would determine not to go to sleep so long as those parties were going on. You were up and just as much alive as everybody else, even at midnight.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I wasn’t a real shy little girl.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: No, you weren’t, and I can’t remember that you ever talked baby talk. We just, we didn’t talk baby talk to you, so you never learned. Of course, your children, the same way.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: When I first started taking piano lessons, how old was I then? Do you remember?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: No, I don’t.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I wonder how I reacted to the lessons. I was always a tomboy, wasn’t I?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, and you used to climb up in the – now, I can’t understand how you got up in that dogwood tree. One of those two dogwood trees that’s right back of our house when the top is a way up there – I mean, the first branching is a way up there, I know, and I don’t –
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I’ll tell you how I did it; I still remember. Between the two forks, I just wedged myself between them.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, but how did you get up – well, I thought you were lower down than that. That’s what bothers me.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Well, we��ll let Melissa try it when she’s there.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah, well, I’m sure the tree has grown some. And you know that maple tree, just to the east side of our porch, well she jumped over it at one time, because I planted it.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: We used to play croquet on that side of the house. There was grass on that hill at one point, no rocks, grass.
Mr. George Russell: Is that right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: It really was different. And we had Jewish neighbors on this side. Tell me about the Schwartzes a little bit.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: The Schwartzes. Well, I’ve forgotten just when the Schwartzes came there. Do you remember? They had two children, Alan and Raina. Raina is Melissa’s age and Alan was older, but he was younger than you.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Maybe my age or a year younger.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I’m sure he was a little younger, yeah. And Melissa and Raina fought all the time, too. Now they’re good friends, but they��re a long ways apart. Raina is in Israel, an Israeli citizen. Her father was a biologist who was chiefly interested in the biology of maize, and he had his own little corn field in Oak Ridge. He didn’t know anything practical about corn, but he knew all about its biology. But he moved, got a job – well, first, they had a year in Israel. And that’s the year that Frank Fenimore lived – you remember the Fenimores?
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: Yeah, they lived next door to us, right?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: For a year, they lived there, and he at Southern Illinois University and came down to the Biology Department for a year while the Schwartzes were in Israel. Did you know that Fenimore died? Yeah, a little over a month ago. He last year went to – he was fifty-four years old at that time, but he entered the Episcopal seminary, University of the South. He was originally a Roman Catholic, and when they lived next to us, she was a Baptist, and I don’t know why we never thought that they might be interested in going to St. Stephen’s, but after they moved – oh, he stayed up in Illinois then for a year or two and then came back to Biology Division. Then all at once, they began coming to St. Stephen’s and became very active members of it. The Schwartzes went to Bloomington. There had been – she had a heart problem. She’s still alive, still has heart problems and in very bad shape part of the time. Alan was walking to school one morning when he just dropped dead, like that.
Mr. George Russell: The son.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Yeah. They don’t know why, but Raina, I don’t know where she went to school, but anyway, Caroline and Melissa had kept contact with them. Raina was recently back – well, we’d heard at one time she was going to stay in the states, but she went back to Israel, and she was back on a visit recently, and Pearl called Caroline and inquired about Melissa. And so she called Melissa, and Melissa called Raina the next weekend and Raina spent the night over with Melissa.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: What were some of the things we did with the Schwartzes. I can remember going to Alan’s bar mitzvah.
Mr. Boyd Weaver: Oh yes, we did. I didn’t remember whether you went to it. That’s the only time I’ve been in that building.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: We celebrated some of the Jewish feasts with them. Did we go to Passover with them once, or was it Hanukah one evening we went over?
Mr. Boyd Weaver: I don’t remember.
Mrs. Cynthia Russell: I remember being jealous that they got presents for seven days in a row or something like that for Hanukah. Every night the present would get bigger and better, and I had to wait for Christmas. I didn’t think that was at all fair. I wanted to be Jewish. But Alan and I played a lot together. I remember we would run through the woods. I must have been outside most of the time when I was playing. We would go down to the woods that were behind Eastern Hill and climb trees in there and play make-up games whenever we played.
[end of recording]